Years ago, Miss Barbara on Romper Room taught me to “Turn That Frown Upside Down!” when I was sad or angry. Of course I was sad and angry every time I watched Romper Room because notonce did Miss Barbara see an “Elyse” in her magic mirror.
She should have seen me in that damn mirror. I was a good kid. (Google Image)
Oops. Sorry. That isn’t what this post is about.
I’ve actually found over the years that for the normal level of bummed-out-ness, turning my frown upside down (TMFUD) is quite an effective anti-depressant. It is even more efficacious when combined with a walk and/or singing. If I TMFUD while walking and singing, I am a happy camper. (Of course the other folks around me might not be quite so smiley.)
As I got older though, I found that TMFUD was less effective against the bigger things that life threw at me. I needed something approaching “schadenfreude,” which, as you know, is taking pleasure in others’ misfortune.
Now, I don’t think that I ever really – even to this day – actually take pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. I’m somewhat nicer than that.
But I do like to look at someone else’s troubles and balance them against my own. Then I am much more willing to keep my own. And I feel immensely relieved.
In the early 1980s, neither my sister Judy nor I were, umm, living the high life. Life was one crisis after another for both of us. I was sick and poor. She was a young mother –that wasn’t the bad part — with no education, no prospects, and a shaky relationship with her husband. She was also poor.
Her problems always seemed worse than mine, and she felt the same way about my troubles. It made us content with our own struggles. So, being sisters, we made our respective miseries and misfortunes something of a contest.
I called Jude one day with bad news about the state of my health and she stopped me before I’d gotten the “woe” out in “woe is me.” Bitch.
“This morning,” Judy announced, “I woke up and went downstairs to make coffee.” I could picture her standing with one hand on her hip, taking a drag from her cigarette. “And do you know what happened as I walked across the cold floor in my bare feet?”
I knew it wasn’t going to be good.
“I stepped in mouse intestines — in my bare feet!” Judy’s cat, Izzy, a prolific hunter, had brought home some spoils for the family. “Nobody’s should start the day with mouse intestines between their toes.”
Google Image
Judy was right — no day should start that way. And that was when I co-opted the motto for my life:
Life is Good*
* As long as you don’t have mouse intestines between your toes.
I’ve never seen that Tee-shirt in the series. I think they need to expand.
Anyway, sadly Judy is gone, and I’d kind of forgotten about my motto.
In the last six months while I’ve been under the weather, not having Judy’s misfortunes to compare mine to made feeling crappy much crappier.
But today I stumbled across a story that inspired me, just the way my sister Judy used to. It made me feel that somebody is worse off than me. And it made me glad that I have my own troubles, and not this woman’s.
Today I read a story about a woman whose situation makes me squirm.
A story that made me realize that things for me really aren’t so bad.
A story that turned my frown upside down.
It was an article about an unfortunate woman who, while vacationing in Peru, had a bit of bad luck. A horn of plenty, running over with misfortune. A veritable ear full of it.
A British woman returned from a holiday in Peru hearing scratching noises inside her head was told she was being attacked by flesh-eating maggots living inside her ear.
Ewwwwwwww.
They aren’t all this cute. (Google image, natch)
Those Tee-shirt guys need to snap this motto up fast. Because really:
Life is good*
*As long as you don’t have flesh-eating maggots inside your ear.
Well, maybe life isn’t so good if you were eating when you read this. Then, I just bet, life could be better.
John and I agree on many, if not most, important things in life.
But we have very different feelings about squirrels. He hates them and often tries to chase them off. He runs out of the family room door, waving his arms to shoo them off.
I’m pretty sure our squirrels are baffled by John. On the one hand, he puts out a delicious smorgasbord for them every single day. On the other, he runs out, waving his arms in the air, as if warning them of an alien invasion.
“Humans!” they twitter to each other. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without em!”
Me, I find squirrels so entertaining and so clever, that, well, I just can’t begrudge them some bird seed. Or most of the bird seed. I realize that from time to time we have to replace the expensive squirrel-proof bird feeders that they cleverly open, empty and render completely useless. Then there is the $4.2 billion we spend annually on birdseed instead of the $1.38 we would spend if we only had birds at our buffet.
Yes, a large number of squirrels enjoy E&J’s all-you-can-eat buffet. If you’re a squirrel at our house, you’re “In with the ‘In-Crowd.'”
Anyway, about two months ago, John walked into the kitchen from the Dining Room where he has been throwing papers around since our dog Cooper got too old to go upstairs to John’s real office where he used to throw his paper. And John saw a squirrel drinking out of our bird bath.
He started towards the door to do his arm-waving routine, when he stopped. Because John saw that something else was going to chase the squirrel away!
Another animal came up onto our little deck, and headed towards the squirrel. A fox!
Google Image
The fox lunged at the unsuspecting squirrel, and they both disappeared into the hedge. Only one of them was ever seen again.
Meet Lucky:
Photo Credit: ME! (Yeah, it was an incredibly Lucky shot!)
It was about 5-1/2 years ago when I first recommended canonization of my husband, John, to the Vatican. Even though I am a very lapsed Catholic, I’m sure they’ll go along with it. Because he really does deserve it. Good spouses of many people with chronic diseases deserve special recognition, but I’m pretty sure only John deserves sainthood. Because all the good saints have been tortured, haven’t they? And John absolutely fits that bill.
Saint Sebastian by Il Sodoma, c. 1525 (Image from Wikipedia) I couldn’t find any saints who were suffocated, so John has a good shot
Let me mention that I’ve been reluctant to write about this subject. But after multiple requests following my last post about good hygiene and the New Jersey Turnpike, I figured I’d just get it over with and get on with my life.
I knew from an early age that there was one moniker I never wanted to have. I never wanted to be a “Pooter-Pack.”
It’s a bad thing, being a Pooter-Pack. Nobody likes them or wants them around. And nobody wants to be called a pooter-pack.
In fact, in possibly the only instance where my brother was caught doing something wrong, Fred’s mouth was washed out with soap for calling our paperboy a “Pooter-Pack.”
What, you might ask is a “Pooter-Pack?”
It’s a pack of pooters, DUH! You know – farts. Butt burps. Cutting the cheese. “Fluff” as my childhood best friend Liz’s family called them for no logical reason.
I did not want to be a pooter-pack. No-sirree Bob. And for the longest time, I wasn’t. Those were golden years that I did not fully appreciate.
To set the record straight, I did not become a pooter-pack that day when all the kids in my 6th grade English class thought I did. I was viciously maligned. Tagged. Ridiculed. It was a hot spring day and my young, innocent, bare leg stuck to my plastic seat. When I moved, I made a nasty fart-like sound with my leg.
Let’s be clear about this: I did not fart. I would have died first.
I wanted to disappear. Disolve. Die. It was so unfair. I didn’t! Not even so much as an SBD! And it had no smell at all because I hadn’t farted. It was a leg, umm, fart. They’re different. Somewhat pleasant, even.
I tried to defend myself, but the whole class heard the noise and believed the boys, not me. I hate them all still.
Fast forward past many fart-free years.
In the early 1980s, I had a severe case of colitis-that-was-really-Crohn’s disease. That was when I really started tooting my own horn. Quietly, though, thankfully. SBDs.
One of the treatments for many kinds of bowel disease is a drug called prednisone. One of prednisone’s most notable symptoms is flatulence. Prednisone does not give a girl delicate lady-like whiffs of something vaguely unpleasant that might induce a brief nose wrinkle.
Nope. Waves of heavy, inescapable stink accompany a person taking prednisone. Like Charlie Brown’s friend, Pig Pen, a smelly cloud hung around me wherever I went.
(Google image. Done by Charles Shultz, of course. Who, I am quite sure never had gas.)
In the Metro. On a bus. In an elevator. In my office. I was engulfed in my nasty, stinky cloud.
In spite of the evidence of everybody’s senses, I never admitted I had a problem. That it was me polluting the air. Nope. I didn’t say a word to anyone. I just couldn’t bear another bit of humiliation. (But frankly, unless there were a whole lot of lucky people around me suffering from anosmia, loss of smell, people were polite or stupid.)
I’m going with polite. Because my friends and co-workers were truly terrific. And they knew just how embarrassing life was for me. You see, when you have bowel disease, you are constantly in humiliating, compromising positions. I’ve written about that many times, including here.
I didn’t mention that I’d become a pooter-pack to my parents, who were, luckily for them, safely in another state. I couldn’t mention it to my sisters, including Beth, the nurse, who would have known the reason (I didn’t) or Judy, who would have laughed herself silly and taken me along with her.
I also didn’t mention it to my roommate, Keily. Keily lived with me. She was exposed to the ill effects of the prednisone but never once broached the subject (she is the biggest-hearted person in the world, my friend Keily is).
I’m pretty sure that my dog, Goliath, loved me more because of the smell. Dogs are gross.
The only person who ever mentioned flatulence to me was my gastroenterologist, Dr. C., the guy who gave me the damn fart pills.
“Are you having any gas?” he’d ask. It was always the last in the usual lineup of embarrassing questions.
I would look him straight in the eye and say:
“Gas? Me? No,” I lied, everysingletime.
Dr. C would tilt his head like Goliath and look straight at me as we sat together in my stink cloud. Every time he’d wait for my answer to change.
It never did.
As far as my medical records from that time are concerned, I have never ummm, fluffed. Dr. C surely wrote me up in a medical journal somewhere. Or perhaps he went to a doctor to have his own sense of smell assessed.
Anyway, I had my surgery and for years I lived up to what I told Dr. C. I did not pooter. Truthfully this time.
I’m not sure that that was what first attracted John to me, but I’m sure the fact that I did not have a stink cloud around me didn’t hurt. We’d been married about 20 years when my Crohn’s symptoms, ummm, re-erupted in about 2006.
I felt fine, actually. But something peculiar happened whenever I would go to bed. It started out slowly, gently, and then progressed to putrid: Whenever I lay down, my bottom end erupted. The most noxious substance passed out of my body and into the air in the bedroom.
It never happened if I was upright. Ever. Only John had to deal with it.
“There’s actually some comfort in it,” John said towards the beginning. “Not every husband can be sure that their wife won’t lay with another man.”
I pursed my lips and glared at him.
Still, I couldn’t imagine what could possibly be happening. But then I started to worry. You see, when I had my surgery in 1982, which was for documented colitis, the doctors disagreed after the fact about what I had. If it came back within 10 years, it was Crohn’s; if it didn’t, it was colitis. It turned out that it was Crohn’s that came back over 20 years later. And it came back with a bang.
The first person I told my gaseous problem to was my late sister, Beth. Beth was a nurse, and she was incredibly smart. Amazing, in fact. She could diagnose any malady in a nano-second. So I told her about my problem, and that it was getting worse.
“I really don’t know what to do,” I told her.
“Gee, Lease,” she said sympathetically, “It sounds like you could clear Walmart.”
“Thanks, Beth. That helps.”
“Try some GasX,” she recommended a bit more helpfully.
And I did. GasX works. It really does. It even works on weird gas problems like mine. Sort of.
At that time, GasX was available in two forms. One that claimed it kept gas away for 4 hours, and the other said it kept it away for 6 hours. Never was a drug label more accurately written. Because exactly at 4 hours plus one second, all that stored up flatulence would burst out into my bedroom, like a neutron bomb. In the middle of the night, and into the place where my poor husband tried to sleep with me.
He never complained. Occasionally, he would moan “Oh, Lease,” but I’m sure that was just his way of searching for oxygen.
My boss, a physician, noticed me researching flatulence one day, and asked me why. I confessed my problem to her.
She stood in my office and laughed until her belly hurt.
It’s never good when a doctor can’t stop laughing after you’ve described your symptoms. Unfortunately, she couldn’t help me either, and she’s brilliant. She’d never heard of reclining flatulence, either. Nor had Google, my bible.
Unlike my previous time as a pooter-pack, this time there was no cloud of stink. Instead, this time the stink formed a curtain, a wall around the bed. It was truly horrible laying there in the poisonous air. But I would, being the good wife I am, try to rid myself of the gas by going to the bathroom.
When I came back? Getting back was like walking through a brick wall. There was literally a physical wall of stinky bricks.
Which brings me to the reason my husband should be canonized. Because for 2 years, and until the third of three different doctors poked and prodded and tested, did the third one figure out what was wrong with me (an internal abscess that required surgery), my husband did not complain that I was not exactly a dream wife.
And never once did he call me a pooter-pack.
* * *
In a last-ditch effort to save a little bit of my nearly exhausted pride, I will tell you that since that surgery, I have not been a pooter-pack. Honest. Would I lie?
Anybody who has been here at FiftyFourAndAHalf very much, knows that I have a special affection for the United Kingdom.
After all, my very first trip abroad was to London. I wanted to live in London and even planned to attend acting school there, which made for one of those memories that no amount of drinking can eliminate.
My husband, John, took me to the UK and asked me to marry him in Scotland on a clifftop overlooking Edinburgh Castle at sunset.
Look, they’re celebrating too! (Thanks Google)
So I really like the UK.
But it’s the 4th of July. And so we cannot take the British Monarchy too seriously, now, can we? Can we?
Happy 4th of July to my American friends. To my British friends, I say this:
Maybe I’ve mentioned once or twice that my brother, Fred, was a wonderful big brother. I really don’t exaggerate. If you could have made up the perfect big brother, it would have been Fred. But you probably would have given him a better name.
Fred is 3 years older than me. And he played with me all the time. He didn’t beat me up. He wasn’t mean. He let me tag along wherever he went.
He actually seemed to enjoy my company, too. Or at least, it never occurred to me that he might not be enjoying it. Perhaps I was late in picking up some social clues. Anyway, I can honestly not remember Fred ever hurting me, or setting me up to fail, or doing any mean big brother things to me.
He was my hero. When we tucked towels into our jammies and jumped off the back of the couch, I was not just pretending Fred was Superman. He was Superman. Of course I also thought that our dog, Tip, was SuperDog when we called him “Kripto,” tucked a dishtowel into his collar and pushed him off the back of the couch.
It was during the late 1950s and early 60s; we saw Westerns on TV and in the movies — The Lone Ranger, Branded, How the West Was Won, and more. There were a lot of shoot outs at our house, too, because that’s what we played most of the time. Fred invented great games for us. Cowboys and Indians, gun fights, sheriff and posse.
Fred was always the hero. Me?
I was the bad guy who got outgunned and had to keel over and die.
I was the outlaw brought to justice by the handsome sheriff.
I was the squaw who had to skin and cook the deer.
I always lost.
I felt good that at least I had a better part than Tip. Tip was the deer, and Fred and I would chase him around pretending to shoot him with arrows. Fred and his friends once caught Tip and tied him onto our broom and carried him Indian-style, to roast over our pretend fire. Tip escaped and didn’t want to play Indian for a week or so. We did not eat him.
Tip was much less cooperative for some reason. (Google Image)
Losing wasn’t a condition for Fred to play with me, but it was reality. Fred always won. He was always first, fastest, bravest. He was always the hero.
Fred’s pretend horse, Thunder, was faster than my horse, Lightning, even after Fred discovered that in real life lightning comes first. Fred showed me pictures of lightning in “the big dictionary” – a huge reference book we loved to look at. It had the coolest pictures and lots of words we couldn’t read. If something was in the big dictionary, it was fact. Period. “In real life,” Fred said, pointing to a picture of a scary bolt in a stormy sky, “Lightning is faster than thunder. But not with horses.”
I really didn’t mind. If Fred’s horse was slightly faster than mine, that was OK. We were a team.
But one day when Fred wanted to play Cowboys and Indians, I’d had enough of losing. Maybe I was growing up.
“I wanna be the cowboy,” I insisted. “You always get to be the cowboy. I always get shot.”
“OK,” Fred said. He didn’t argue or try to convince me to be the Indian. I should have been suspicious. But I’ve always trusted Fred completely. I knew he would never be mean to me.
“OK,” said Fred, again, thinking up a new game. “You can be a General! I’ll be an Indian, ummmm, I’ll be called Crazy Horse.”
“OK!” I said, excitedly. A General! I wasn’t just cowboy. I was gonna be a general!
I blew my bugle, called my troops to arms. My imaginary troops and I rode off on our stallions to fight the Injuns.
I blew my bugle again and my (pretend) troops surrounded me. We heard Indian war whoops from Fred and his Indian braves. Fred/Crazy Horse and his braves came at me, surrounding me and my men on all sides. But I wasn’t worried. I was a general. And even at that age, I knew that the cowboys always win.
And then Fred shot me.
I did not flinch. I did not fall. I did not succumb to my wounds. I screamed bloody murder:
“I’m the cowboy! You can’t shoot me!
I’M THE GENERAL!”
Fred calmed me down and took me by the hand over to the big dictionary. He turned the pages and showed me a picture of a general in a cowboy hat with blond curls. He looked just like me. Except for the mustache (mine grew in many years later).
Thanks a lot, Google
George Armstrong Custer.
“That’s General Custer,” Fred said. “Crazy Horse killed him. Or Sitting Bull did. Some Indian killed him at the battle of Little Bighorn. The Sioux Indians surrounded General Custer and his men and killed them.”
I didn’t have a chance
If it was in a book, in the big dictionary, well then, I had to die. It was right there in black and white with a color picture. It was my fate.
We went back over to the battlefield (the front hall) and started the battle again. Again, I blew my bugle and rallied my troops into a circle around me. Again, the Indians pressed forward, surrounded us.
Again, General Custer got shot. And this time he/I was brave. I clutched my heart, tossed my curls and fell dead.
* * *
I owe my devotion to the underdog and my tendency to look everything up to my big brother, who is still wonderful.
And I looked this up: June 25th is the 137th Anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn. And speaking once more as General Custer, I deserved exactly what I got.
FiftyFourandAHalf 